


Stay

by kmo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Episode: s03e03 Secondo, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 11:24:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12253428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: After Palermo, she stays and he lets her stay.





	Stay

The flat is quiet. The lights are dimmed. He has washed the dishes and put them away, his own nighttime ritual. Far below, the tourists have forsaken the city’s trattorias and enotecas for their hotels. It is the off-season after all. Normally, Hannibal finds the sound of drunken revelers rude, but on this night he wishes for it, just a little human presence to fill the void.

They had eaten, a simple meal prepared by Bedelia—fresh bread and cheese, dark purple olives and a crisp table white. His visit to Palermo had left him with little appetite, and even less of a desire to cook or hunt for that matter. He smiles a little at the pork shoulder filling his freezer, a feast taking shape in his mind. A feast that will keep until his usual bonhomie returns.

Hannibal putters around the still, darkened flat. One would think it empty, but he knows it is not. Even if it were not for the light seeping out from under her door, he knows Bedelia is here, feels her presence keenly, warming their flat, their home. He can sense her, pulsing like a heartbeat, though she makes not a sound. She fills the flat with life, even when she is out of sight. A light, a spark, a glow that had always been missing from his home in Baltimore, cold and vacant as a museum in the nighttime hours. Hers, too, he thinks.

He goes to her door and raps on it softly with his knuckles.

“Yes?” she calls back. They haven’t spoken much since this afternoon. She had left him to brood and retreated to her wine and her books.

He enters her room and closes the door, though there is no one to shield their conversation from. He does so out of a need for privacy, intimacy. She sits at her gilded vanity brushing out her hair. Suddenly he is sad not to have arrived sooner—he would have liked to be the one to brush her hair, to smooth her curls and stroke her until she went limp in his arms, purring like a beloved Persian housecat. He had done so often in their first few months here, though lately such intimacies had become rarer than threads of saffron. He perches on the edge of her bed, watching her ritual, assigning it to a place of honor in his memory palace.

“I thought about you a great deal on the return train from Palermo. I did not know what I would find when I arrived at the station,” he says.

Bedelia’s eyes shift watchfully in the mirror. She puts down her brush and gathers her hair back behind her head with a blue silk ribbon before beginning the process of wiping off her makeup with a damp towel. “You found me at the station.”

“I did.”

“You did not expect to,” she says, phrasing it as a statement, not as a question. She begins to scrub away at the liner and mascara that coats her eyelids and lashes. It leaves her skin with a reddish flushed glow, and has the benefit of shielding her gaze from him.

He steps closer and unscrews an enamel jar of Crema al Polline, filling the room with the smell of beeswax and honey. Bedelia, the queen of the hive; the thought makes him smile. He hands her the jar. “I thought there was a strong likelihood you would not be here when I returned, given our last conversation.”

Bedelia spreads the moisturizer over her face with a swift, agitated arrogance. He does not know whether it is because she dislikes being seen with her makeup removed, her naked flesh vulnerable and showing her forty-odd years more clearly, or if there is some deeper cause. He believes her wrinkles only enhance her beauty, every fine line and crease an untold story from a time before he knew her. Those deepening grooves around her lips, for example—had she been a youthful smoker? She screws the lid back on to her moisturizer and turns to face him. “Are you disappointed I chose to stay? Perhaps you feel I am intruding on your impending reunion with Will Graham.”

“No,” he says, stooping to plant a kiss at her temple, right at the spot where her golden locks have begun to silver. “I would be…sad…to discover you had gone.”

An unfathomable expression ghosts across Bedelia’s face and she blinks two or three times. It takes him a second to realize she is fighting back tears. “Was this all a test, Hannibal?” she asks hoarsely.

“I was curious as to what you would do. I wished to give you the space to leave…if that was what you desired.”

“So, you could have the pleasure of hunting me down and punishing me for rudely abandoning you. Again.” Her eyes burn back at him, a cold flame that somehow scalds.

“I don’t know,” he tells her in all honesty. “I did not let my imaginings wander that far.”

She has returned to brushing out her hair, running the horsehair bristles through the ends of her blonde locks with a vengeance. “I left you once before. And yet you waited to call on me. Did you wish me to escape then, too?”

He answers her with silence.

She spins round to face him, pinning him down with her sharp sapphire gaze, despite the difference in their heights. “Did you intend to kill me then?”

He swallows, an intense lump of conflicting emotions congealing in his throat. “I intended to take you.”

“As you took Miriam Lass. And Abigail Hobbs,” Bedelia says, unable to repress a soupcon of poison from slipping in to her voice. “Take me and keep me as what—your pet psychiatrist? Another almost-sister for your menagerie?”

 

They have never spoken of this, the past, though it has been there, shadowing even their most sunlit and carefree days. He has nothing to say in defense of himself; if he were in court, he would plead the Fifth Amendment, for any answer would only further incriminate. Instead he redirects the conversation. “Why did you stay this time, Bedelia?”

She turns her back to him again and he must watch her in the mirror. Her posture goes very stiff and still. “Because I came here to pursue self-knowledge, to see the parts of my nature I have kept veiled, even from myself. What you said the other night is true—I have been participating as much as I have been observing since I accepted Neal Frank as my patient.”

He has swallowed and digested her insights many times, no matter how unpalatable they seemed at first; it warms him somehow to see her absorb his in turn. He steps closer and squirts a dollop of hand cream into his palm, inclined to participate in Bedelia’s bedtime ritual, unable to just observe. “May I?” he asks.

She nods and extends her hands. He massages the cream into her flesh, soothing tensions he doubts she was even aware of. It is very intimate, this mingling of hands, and it is gratifying to see her eyelids flutter a bit in soft contentment. He continues to hold her hands in his after he has finished, thumb stroking the side of her ring finger as the diamond sparkles in the lamplight.

“I may never be able to participate in the way you would like me to, Hannibal. With the passion…others…might. I will always prefer to observe.”

By others, he knows she means Will Graham. A man who perhaps will do him the satisfaction of neither, whose first inclination was to betray him. Will sees him so clearly, so easily, as if by animal instinct, a sixth sense he alone has been blessed with out of all of humanity. But Bedelia has chosen to see him, to look for him, to listen. And perhaps that choice, freely given, is worth more.

He wraps his arms about her shoulders and pulls her close to his bare chest, stroking her hair gently, letting his fingertips communicate the tenderness she would reject in words. “You have stayed and I will let you stay, Bedelia. For as long as you wish.”

She nods against his chest and he can feel the fight quite go out of her. She rises and slips seamlessly into his arms. “I will dance with you here in Florence until the music ends.”

Her admission is a bit bittersweet and suddenly he is awash in regret over the past few months, the wasted nights and days when he blamed her for who she wasn't instead of cherishing her for the woman she was. “I want to stay here with you,” he tells her, gathering her close in his arms.

She nods again against his chest and they sway a bit in each other’s arms, a slow dance without a melody. She glides away, removing her robe and tossing it over a chair. “For tonight?” she asks, climbing into bed.

“For all our nights.”

Her eyebrow arches a little even as a rosebud of a smile tugs at her lips, one she does not let bloom. He turns over and extinguishes the lamp. They seek each other’s warmth in the dark, Bedelia running her fingers though his chest hair and over his shoulders, him nuzzling her nose and forehead, seeking out her scent. Having her in his arms again feels like home—easy to cast her as a faithful Penelope to his wandering Odysseus. Her hands map the planes of his face and stroke the rough stubble of his cheek and suddenly he pulls her closer, close enough for her to feel his hardening desire for her.

“You were too tired to cook. I thought you would be too tired for this as well,” she says, that hint of amusement creeping into her voice that he always finds very,  _very_ sexy.

Her hands wander to the front of his pajama bottoms and she begins to stroke and tease him. “Not too tired,” he says with a groan, flipping her over onto her back. She throws her arms about his neck, drawing him in. Desire washes over both of them like a wave; there is a longing to drown in one another, body and soul.

As they rock together later that night in perfect counterpoint, every thrust chants an unspoken prayer:  _Stay Stay Stay_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title and the fic is inspired by Gillian Anderson's explanation of Bedelia and Hannibal's relationship at Toronto FanExpo in 2015. While admitting that Bedannibal is a whole contradictory mess of things that is hard to pin down (and perhaps shouldn't be pinned down), Gillian says that the fact "she stayed and he let her stay" tells us a lot about them both. 
> 
> I also think the cut scene from "Secondo" when Bedelia meets Hannibal at the station was supposed to carry more dramatic weight--that her decision to stay is a kind of turning point for them as they near the end of their time in Florence. 
> 
> The Crema al Polline is fancy moisturizer sold at the Santa Maria Novella apothecary, supposedly the oldest continually operating pharmacy in the world. It features in Hannibal the novel and I'm sad we didn't get to see Bedelia and Hannibal visit on the show, as I have no doubt they would have. (even if Hannibal would have side-eyed the touch screen displays...)


End file.
